The Long Night of King Oberon
by Miri Fern
Summary: After Tania refuses his marriage proposal, Edric tries to avoid her. But a special summons from the princess reveals their relationship is in even worse condition than he thought.


_A/N: This story is (technically) set the day before The Immortal Realm begins, but here Edric proposed marriage to Tania at an earlier date (and she refused the same way, leading to him storming off)._

* * *

Because the summons had come from royalty, Edric had no choice but to go. If he could have resisted the call, he would've stayed far away from the palace and Her beautiful, callous Highness, the princess.

She met him in her chambers, signaling the guards to let him in, and shooed away the petite handmaidens and groveling attendants fawning over her. As soon as she laid eyes upon him hovering in the doorway, she flashed him a dazzling smile. He turned his gaze away from her and bowed respectfully; when he rose she was no longer smiling.

"I know you're still upset with me," she said. "But I just can't marry you. I'm not even seventeen yet. I mean, if we tried to get married back home, we'd be arrested!"

"But you are back home, Tania," he murmured. They'd known each other long enough that he could dispense with titles and formal address.

She shook her head violently, sending a few locks of carefully plaited red hair loose. "I've always been Anita, and I still am now. I'm Tania too, I guess, but..."

He frowned. After all that had happened, he thought she would have forgotten all about her old life as ordinary Anita. She defeated the Sorcerer King, watched Zara die and Rathina's redemption, the destruction and restoration of their world. After all that, she still thought of London as her home and Anita Palmer as her identity?

She _had_ brought her mortal parents between the worlds. Though Oberon and Titania were royalty, Tania clearly saw them as equal to Clive and Mary. Perhaps even superior...

"Is anyone eavesdropping on our conversation?" she asked, shaking him from his thoughts.

"No. We're alone."

"Good, because I'm positive one of those servants would run and tell the king all about this." She tried to stand up, only to nearly fall flat on her face. Uttering a curse under her breath, she stooped and lifted the fabric of her dress inappropriately high in order to make her way over to him. "I want to go back, Evan. Back to the human world."

"My name is Edric, not Evan," he replied, his tone sounding more offended than he would have liked. What was up with her? She hadn't called him by his fake name since she learned it was, well, _fake_. Just another aspect of the trickery Gabriel Drake had used to ensnare her.

"When we met at school, you were Evan," she insisted.

"And I called you Anita. But you've been having everyone call you Tania ever since you found out the truth, even your friends in London."

Her brow furrowed painfully. "Jade and Rosa and Lily, Susheela, Natalie… I'll have to make up for all the time I've lost with them."

A little guilty, Edric quickly changed the subject. "I would prefer if you called me Edric."

She sighed. "Fine."

The false name and his enrollment at her high school had all been part of his mission to blend in with the humans in order to get close to her. So had becoming her boyfriend, though that had ceased to be a charade a long time ago. When they finally managed to spirit her away, she'd been overwhelmed by the grandeur of the palace, enchanted by Faerie, and spellbound at the revelation that she was King Oberon's long-lost daughter, the princess Tania. But before the shock could wear off, they'd had to worry about Rathina and Gabriel and the Sorcerer King. It seemed a lifetime since they had been just two teenagers, playing the parts of Romeo and Juliet in the school play. He felt older. He _was_ older—he'd lived through the Great Twilight, five centuries of ageless gloom, waiting for Tania to return.

Now that it was all over, he only wanted to settle down, marry his love, and live happily ever after. The circumstances under which they had met no longer mattered. He'd come to love her on his own, after seeing her courage and unbreakable spirit. And since she seemed to return his feelings, he couldn't understand why she'd rejected his offer.

"Cordelia and Bryn are getting married tomorrow," she said. "I want to get out of here before that happens."

"What? But she's your sister—surely you should at least stay for her sake?"

"Are you kidding? From the way the whole royal family talks, if I don't stay here forever, your entire world will fall apart. With so much hanging in the balance, why would they ever let me go?"

"Why would you want to go back?" he shot back. "The mortal world is cruel and unjust. The humans destroy the earth with their industry and machines. Don't you remember how much it hurt whenever you touched iron?"

"I understand the human world. I don't understand this place." When he eyed her suspiciously, she sighed and added, "Rathina told me Faeries never fall out of love. If you take it just as seriously as humans do, then I'm not certain I feel the same way about you. I'm still in high school—what do I know about love, anyway?"

He hadn't even considered whether she knew the most absolute and obvious of their rules. Truth be told, he simply assumed she operated the same way he did. His feelings had grown so strong, he was blinded…

"We're running out of time," she said. Touching his cheek, she forced him to look at her. "Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I don't belong here. I'm not happy. I miss my family and friends and my house and London—"

"King Oberon lets you visit them on occasion. He even let you bring your parents here."

"I don't want to see them 'on occasion'! Can you imagine if someone told you you were really a human, and you had no choice but to live between the two worlds? Wouldn't you hate that?"

Reluctantly, Edric nodded.

"Then you understand why I want to go back. I know the king will be upset, and I'm sorry, but I don't know him as my father, or Queen Titania as my mother, or any of the other princesses as my sisters, and I _just don't get it_." She put her other hand on his other cheek, cupping his face in her hands. "I care about you a lot—I think I love you—but I'm not ready for marriage or all the responsibilities of being royalty, much less learning to live in this world. I need time to grow up some more, and the only way I can do that is on Earth. I had plans for my future. I was going to be an investigative journalist and travel the world."

He touched the back of her hand. "You should be explaining this to the king. If you just up and left without his knowledge, he would scour the earth until he found you again."

"Okay… I'll talk to him. Will you go with me?"

"Of course."

She threw her arms around his neck and thanked him. Already he was beginning to ache inside, an agony far greater and much more persistent than any he had ever felt before. He was hoping the king would be able to bring her to her senses.

But the pain worsened after he took her to the great hall, where Oberon sat regally on his throne. The king listened somberly as she presented her case, pleading with him to let her return to the Mortal Realm.

Edric saw in the king's eyes a suffering that far surpassed his own. She even admitted she had no feelings deeper than a surface-level fondness for him and Titania, her own true parents. She didn't really love her sisters, or her country, or the material objects that had once been hers. She had no memory of Tania, the princess of Faerie. As far as she was concerned, Tania was long dead. There was only Anita Palmer.

After this declaration, Edric expected Oberon's fury. To his shock, Oberon let her go without question, for he loved his seventh daughter beyond reason. She would be lost to him again, perhaps forever, as he once thought her mother had been. But this time it was of her own choosing.

Before nightfall she had bid farewell to her six older sisters. Cordelia tried to convince her to stay one day longer, if only to catch the first part of the wedding ceremony, but she refused.

Then she turned to Edric. "Will you come with me?"

He remembered his promise. Wherever she went, he would follow. But if she wouldn't marry him, what then?

There were things about him she didn't know of. When he was Gabriel's servant, he took dictation for his master. Not just any dictation—he copied spells. Dark Arts incantations. He remembered the most useful ones, including a method of moving between the worlds...

"If you'll take me back here, sure."

If she caught the coldness in his voice, she showed no outward sign. They walked in silence to the Brown Tower, the Faerie counterpart of her bedroom in London. There she took his hand in hers and side-stepped between the worlds.

Anita's room was dark, lit only faintly by streetlights outside her window. She flicked the light switch, and Edric winced slightly as the room filled with harsh electric light.

She embraced him. "I'll visit you as often as I can," she whispered by his ear. "Or you could stay here awhile. I'm sure my parents won't mind."

Edric hurt down to the marrow. If she couldn't coexist in both worlds, how could he?

She must not have noticed him trembling. Releasing him, she bolted to the door, opening it and stepping out into the hallway. Her parents were probably downstairs watching TV, or having dinner. Even if they were asleep in bed, she would probably burst in to tell them she was there.

Edric watched her from afar. Her parents, the Palmers, knew a little about her true heritage, but he doubted they had fully wrapped their minds around the idea their only daughter was a princess cursed to perpetually reincarnate as a death-doomed human for the last five centuries. Then again, the curse had been broken, and she was free to live as she pleased.

Remembering him, Anita stopped and glanced over her shoulder. Her smile evaporated when she saw his face. His distress had become pitifully obvious—he was struggling just to keep his chin up.

She called out his name, but it was too late. Hastily he uttered the incantation to open a portal and dove back into his own world, vowing to himself he would never go back, lest his love for her destroy him utterly. But even as his feet touched his own beloved soil, he knew it was too late for them, too. The sky overhead in Faerie was gray as iron. The long night of King Oberon had begun again.


End file.
